NOTE N°1 Creative artificial intelligence

Is there an oxymoron in this title?

THIS POST WAS WRITTEN ON AN ENDORPHIN HIGH

Right before I went to the gym this morning, I opened up my LinkedIn and read another rant about copywriting generated by ChatGPT. First of all, please don’t get it twisted—as a storytelling professional, I do recognize copy that was copy pasted straight from an AI bot, and I do have opinions about that. But as I was milling this over during my interval run, I realized ChatGPT is a lot like the treadmill I was planting my feet on (and almost teetered off of when I lost an airPod; I am taking recs for better earbuds or headphones!)

Please bear with me as I try out this new format that is basically a little thought I had and want to share, because it might help business owners get a little perspective on how to approach their storytelling and whether, or how, to use artificial intelligence in doing so. Welcome to the first NOTE in my dossiers ;)

( Three ways to get fit )

I am turning 40 on March 5 (adding the date for context so you understand the sense of urgency I’m feeling, tick tock). Please believe me when I say that I am the least sporty and most hedonist foodie you know. And yet, during the past few months I took several steps that have resulted in me hitting the gym 4 times a week, lowering my alcohol intake and eating more protein in a day than my body’s seen in months. That’s not what I want to talk about though, the interesting part is how I got here (and where it will take me, but that’s too early to tell). And yes, this will be relevant to the topic of AI and creativity, trust!

The way I see it, there are three ways to approach the goal ‘getting fit’, and I went through all three of them in quick succession. During the first few weeks (actually, this has been going on for years if I’m totally honest), I listened to friends tell me about their workout routines, show me the nourishing recipes they were making and talk about the difference they were feeling. I wanted to feel great, too, so I started applying some of their advice to my own life, and asked ChatGPT to create a workout schedule and meal plan for me. I was doing lots of little things pretty willy-nilly, so unsurprisingly, nothing really lead to anything, and nothing stuck.

I realized I needed to know more about nutrition and fitness in order to understand what I needed to be doing to create lasting change. So I ordered all. the. books. A few titles in, I was feeling more knowledgable, but also overwhelmed. There is so much information out there, and so many different theories. Where would I start making sense of it all and figuring out what would work for me? ChatGPT wasn’t of much help at this point: it kept asking me whether I wanted to go this way or that route, whether I preferred one option or the other. I kept pushing everything out in front of me, never making any decisions because I was always plagued by all the options I wasn’t choosing. I still didn’t feel informed enough to assess whatever ChatGPT was throwing my way, and to select what would be right for me.

Then a friend came along who super casually mentioned the gym she goes to offers guidance by nutritional specialists and personal trainers, in a very accessible way. The gym is five minutes from my house and three from our girls’ school, so I registered there immediately. I had a wonderful intake and completed three different sessions with their specialists, and now have my very own personal strategy to getting fit in a way that suits my needs—my body, my character, and my life.

Now, I use ChatGPT almost every day, because I know exactly what to ask for. I have very clear guidelines that apply to my specific situation, and I can ask for recipes, excercises, or other little things that I now know how to interpret in function of my strategy.

( You saw this coming )

If you are turning 40, of course you want to feel good and healthy. If you have a business, of course you want to be using storytelling to connect to the right community and get your product or service in their hands. If you go straight to ChatGPT though, its artifical intelligence will gather information from everything that’s out there and use examples of what has already been done. Not very useful if you want your business to stand out and effectively communicate what makes it so special and different.

This is why they say ChatGPT is only as clever as the prompts you use to guide it. If you already have a very clear idea of your business’ strategy and your brand identity, then your prompts will at least be super specific and only generate things that are useful. If you’re not clear on your direction or what sets you apart, you’ll get advice that might make you even more invisible in the stream of (increasingly AI-generated) storytelling on whichever channel you are using.

Let’s say you don’t have a clear brand identity in front of you, and you realize you need it. There are so many frameworks and sources out there, readily available in dozens of different formats: YouTube essays, management books, podcasts, Instagram accounts, whitepapers, entire websites… You can comb through them and figure out how to use all this information to create your brand identity. Let me be clear: this can absolutely be done! I very strongly believe that there are business owners out there who just need to get their hands on the right information, and are then perfectly capable of figuring it all out by themself. It does, however, need a huge investment of time and energy.

The third way to approach it, is to find someone who already knows the frameworks and has the experience of guiding business owners through them to discover what applies to them and works for them. They are strategists because they ask all the right questions (and only the right questions) and they are creative because they translate your insights and choices into a custom strategy that feels right ONLY to your brand. The result is a unique document that serves as a guiding light in whatever steps your business will need to take to get the right storytelling in front of the right audience.

In short—you know what to do and how to do it, to make your storytelling stand out in the right way. So now, if and when you need a quick boost to your copy or communications, you can use ChatGPT the way you’d handle a good intern. You can give them very clear instructions and know exactly what to evaluate them on, so you can make the right corrections for the output to truly fit your needs. This means you can detect and delete the ‘filler’ words, superfluous messaging or wrong tone-of-voice from whatever AI generates for you, and make it your own. And if everyone would just please start doing that, then maybe we won’t have so many rants on LinkedIn about ChatGPT-copy :)

Thanks for humoring me with this new format! Did you like it? Should I send these out on a monthly basis? Whenever I think of something? Do you have suggestions for topics? Let me know!

Cheers,
Steph

( P.S. I am not a PT )

I am not a personal trainer (friends reading this are dying with laughter right now), but I can help you create a brand identity that is unique to your business, and a storytelling strategy that inspires the right kind of communications to connect with your community. I don’t know where you are on your journey, but if you’d like to know what working with a brand strategists looks like, let me know and we’ll schedule a (virtual) coffee date!